Train Kept a Rollin'
Freight train near Mount Shasta, photo by Bruce Fingerhood, — Creative Commons license
Trains played a big part in my life as a child. Later, during my vagabond years, hopping freights was sometimes preferable to waiting forever with your thumb out.
The first train ride I remember was in 1957. Early one weekday morning my second-grade class boarded a Missouri-Pacific train in Carlisle, Arkansas for a field trip to the state capitol. I had been to Little Rock once before, but this was different. Our teacher, Miss Goldie, sat in the back of the rail car deep in conversation with Ginny’s mom, who had volunteered as a chaperone.
Thirty excited seven-year-old baby boomers were left to ourselves as the old coach clickity-clacked along the rails. Some of the kids pretended that they were grown-up businessmen or glamorous film stars, not the hillbilly farm kids that we really were.
The visit to the capitol building, a museum, and a Navy radar station were okay, but the train rides were what impressed us the most. It might have been the decrepit old “MOP” as everyone called the Missouri-Pacific, but in our minds, it could have been the Orient Express, Paris to Istanbul.
A year later, when my parents, sister, and I moved to a US Navy base in Newfoundland, we loaded our ‘56 Chevy onto a ship in Nova Scotia, and were ferried across the Cabot Strait, to debark in Port aux Basques. The plan was to drive across the sub-arctic island to the naval facility on the east coast.
The road was gravel, dirt, and mud. The much-vaunted Trans-Canada Highway was far from complete, and there was no road at all between the towns of Gander and Clarenville. We would have to load our car on the narrow-gauge Newfoundland Railway, and ride the train through the boreal forest to the Avalon Peninsula.
From Cold ‘Coon & Collards:
Following the hand signals of a brakeman standing on the platform, my father slowly inched the auto up a ramp, across the platform, and onto a flatcar. The brakeman gave a thumbs up and began to chain the axles to the wooden deck.
After eating sandwiches in the tiny lunch room, we boarded the train in the long summer twilight of the North. After one long toot, the engine took up the slack in the couplings that linked the cars together. We heard a series of clunks as each carriage was jolted into motion. Soon we were clicking along the tracks, the arboreal forest dark on both sides.
As night fell, a steward walked down the aisle and converted our seats into beds. I fell asleep, my head poked under the window curtain, watching black trees rush past in the moonlight.
Just as the sky was starting to lighten, the clacking of the rails slowed, then stopped, as the train arrived at the station. An hour later, our auto had been unloaded and we were once again bouncing over the ruts and puddles of the unfinished Trans Can.
My next memorable train ride was aboard The San Francisco Chief, a luxurious streamlined train that left from Richmond, California and took three days and two nights to end up in Chicago. Being an eighteen year old knucklehead, I knew that I was of legal drinking age in Texas.
From Lightbulb Coffee:
During the night we must have passed through Arizona. Soon after I awoke, we were in New Mexico. Later, as the train neared the Texas border, I walked forward towards the lounge car.
“I’m eighteen,” I told the Fred Harvey steward at the end of the domed car.
“I’m forty two,” said the black man, as he polished a glass. “So what?”
“May I have an extra dry Martini, please?” I asked.
He laughed, put the shiny glass in a rack, and leaned over the bar. “When we cross the Texas line, you can have all the dry you want.”
When a Welcome to Texas billboard flashed past the window, he asked me, “Can I see your ID?”
I pulled out my wallet and handed him my U.S. Navy dependent’s card. He looked at the card, looked at me, and shrugged. I must have looked like I was fourteen.
He slid a tumbler of ice across the bar and followed it with a four-ounce can labelled “Martini.”
“That’ll be one dollar and fifty cents,” he said.
I paid, then took glass and can up a stair to the glass-domed observation car. I pulled off the aluminum tab, dumped the canned booze over the ice, and drank the watery stuff as the train rocked clickity-clack over the Texas plains. I had been hoping for something more elegant—like a catchy rhythm with a silver shaker, a cute martini glass, and an olive on a toothpick. This was my first legal drink.
There’s another scarier, but beautiful rail ride described in Lightbulb Coffee or How I Survived the Sixties . available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books, Inc.